Sprint

Sprint is the nation's third-largest wireless carrier, albeit by a small margin over T-Mobile at this point. One of the cornerstones of Sprint's business model is being one of the few carrier options that offers "truly unlimited" data, though 2013 saw Sprint cut down many of its plans to tiered and capped data in order to offer lower prices. As other carriers began to move to shared data plans among devices on the same account, Sprint has stuck with the standard model of each device having its own data plan, along with the ability to group into a traditional family plan or new referral-based "Framily" plan.

In a deal that eventually closed in mid-2013, Japanese carrier SoftBank purchased just over 72 percent of Sprint for a total of $21.6 billion in an effort to enter the U.S. wireless market and turn Sprint back around into a profitable and growing carrier. In conjunction with the buyout, Sprint also finalized its purchase of Clearwire, which was a required action as part of the SoftBank investment.

Sprint was very late to the party in rolling out LTE to the country, and is still in the midst of keeping the network stable and fast through its "Network Vision" tower upgrade plan. Part of this is due to the time, money and tower space that was until recently dedicated to its legacy WiMax and Nextel iDEN push-to-talk networks, the latter of which was finally shut down in 2013. Sprint has worked as quickly as possible to repurpose its spectrum holdings — which are almost all in the higher and less desirable bands — to provide faster data services. It primarily operates on the 800, 1900 and 2500MHz bands, even combining the three to provide higher throughput with its "Spark" LTE service on certain devices.

Even with the big money investment from SoftBank and the constantly-improving network situation on its hands, Sprint is still struggling to gain customers quarter-over-quarter. At the current pace of customer loss and acquisition, Sprint could be overtaken by T-Mobile as the third-place carrier in the U.S. in number of subscribers in just a couple of short years. That is, if SoftBank doesn't pull together the money to buy out T-Mobile itself.

More Featured Articles

Sprint's taking the fight straight to T-Mobile and is offering customers of the Un-carrier a guaranteed minimum trade-in credit of $200 for their current working T-Mobile smartphone. That's in addition to the current contract buy-out offer (though T-Mobile ditched traditional contracts nearly two...

Sprint has posted on its support site that its rollout of the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to owners of the HTC One M8 has begun. This is a few days earlier than what a leaked Sprint document sent to Android Central on Thursday indicated, but it is a welcome surprise nonetheless.
The update will...

Sprint is launching yet another price promotion, this time for its Family Share Plan. The limited time offer will give customers up to 10 lines of shared unlimited talk and text, along with 12GB of data, for $90 a month. The carrier says that the offer will end on March 12.
From Sprint:...

All Sprint

Sprint has just announced a new plan that will bundle the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Tab 4 together, bringing lots of data for one low monthly payment.
In their latest attempt to win more customers over, Sprint has just announced that for only $100 a month you can get unlimited talk, text, and...

Sprint is now offering anyone who switches from their current wireless carrier to its service full reimbursement of both their termination fees and any remaining phone payments.
This is just the latest effort from Sprint to get new customers. The company says that it will pay off any remaining...

Sprint says Android 5.1 Lollipop for the Nexus 6 is due to land today, with SMS/MMS fixes and factory reset protection.
Following the recent availability of Android 5.1 factory images for the Nexus 5, 10 and 7 (2012), it looks like Google's latest Nexus phone is next on the list. U.S. operator...

The 2015 Moto E is now available from Sprint Prepaid and Boost Mobile, and is coming to Virgin Mobile on Monday, March 9.
The Moto E is available starting at $99.99 without a contract on all three operators. Sprint Prepaid, Boost, and Virgin Mobile all offer talk, text, and data plans starting...

The over-the-air update for the smartphone also gives its owners some "Wi-Fi Calling Enhancements" in addition to the latest version of Android.
Sprint began rolling out an update today for its customers who own a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to Android 5.0 Lollipop. Actually, the update offers version...

Sprint announced today that it has partnered with Best Buy to offer an exclusive unlimited plan, fittingly called the "Best Buy One Plan," through the retailer starting at $75 per month with a leased Android device.
The Best Buy One Plan allows customers to lease Android devices starting at $...

Sprint is launching yet another price promotion, this time for its Family Share Plan. The limited time offer will give customers up to 10 lines of shared unlimited talk and text, along with 12GB of data, for $90 a month. The carrier says that the offer will end on March 12.
From Sprint:...

T-Mobile CEO John Legere stated today that the wireless carrier has overtaken Sprint, in terms of the number of its customers, to become the third biggest wireless carrier in the US. Legere made those claims as part of T-Mobile's quarterly conference call to analysts following the release of its...

Sprint has posted on its support site that its rollout of the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to owners of the HTC One M8 has begun. This is a few days earlier than what a leaked Sprint document sent to Android Central on Thursday indicated, but it is a welcome surprise nonetheless.
The update will...

Sprint has a brand problem — and RadioShack isn't one to take notes from in that category
After some speculation, Sprint confirmed that it would be buying out 1,750 of RadioShack's stores in conjunction with that company's bankruptcy filing. Rather than clean them out entirely, Sprint will re-...

Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project
and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License. AndroidCentral is an independent site
that is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.